Clean Out Your Facebook App Permissions

It’s not too late in the season to do a little spring cleaning, and even if you’ve already tidied up your home and your tech, there may be one place you haven’t cleaned up: your Facebook apps and their permissions. Now is as good a time as any to take a peek and make sure all of the apps that have permissions to your Facebook account are apps you actually use, and not just apps that you used once a few years ago and forgot about.

Checking on your Facebook app permissions is easy:

1. Visit Facebook. Click on the drop-down next to your name and select “Privacy Settings.”
2. Scroll down to “Apps and Websites” and click “Edit Settings.”
3.Under “Apps You Use,” click “Edit Settings” to get to your application settings.
4.Click the X next to each old application that you no longer use, or click “edit” to more closely examine that app’s permissions to your Facebook account, what the app can do, what data it collects, and more. Then decide if you want to keep the app associated with your account.

Once you’ve finished removing or updating the apps associated with your account, click back to double check the “How People Bring Your Info to Apps They Use” section, and make sure that the apps your friends sign up for and use don’t have access to more information about you than you’d like. We’d suggest unchecking everything in that section. Finally, you might consider bypassing social reader apps so everything you read or watch on connected sites isn’t automatically published to your timeline.

Checking up your Facebook app permissions isn’t something most people think to do—and even if you’re the type who says “I don’t play Facebook games,” or “I don’t sign up for any of that stuff,” you may still have a few stray web services you’ve connected to Facebook for login purposes or other accounts in there from a long time ago. It’ll only take a few minutes, and your privacy will thank you.